Tenacious Bee

I have so many (potentially) blogworthy thoughts in my head. But the mental rough drafts for each are very long and would require a considerable amount of writing skill to pull off successfully. I keep thinking I ought to just sit down and start one of these long, self-aggrandizing posts. Instead, my mind keeps returning to something I saw this morning.

As I was getting into my car this morning, I saw a bee on the roof of my car. I don't like bees (because I was stung once) so I blew on him (of course he's a he) to agitate him enough to fly off. He didn't fly off. Instead, he hunkered down a bit more on the fabric of my ragtop and gave a little listless wave of the wings. I figured he was dying and would thus blow off my car once I started driving. So I headed off to work, listening to Jackson point out every single bus and truck on the way to UCLA. I dropped Jackson off at daycare, then stayed for a while to watch him and chat with one of the other mothers. Finally, I figured it was time to get to work, so I completed my journey down to south campus. When I got out of my car, I spied the bee again. He was displaced about a foot from his original location on my car, but was there nonetheless. I was incredibly impressed. It's about 8 miles to UCLA from home. I figure I'm roughly three or four hundred times larger than a bee, so a journey like that's probably similar to a trip from LA to Atlanta...on the roof of an airplane. I blew on him again and he had the same reaction. I tapped on the roof near him to see if he'd move, but he just hunkered down again.

All day long, my thoughts returned to the bee. I don't know why. I just wondered why he hung onto my car for such a long journey. When I returned to my car at the end of the day, I expected to see a dead version of him on the roof. But I didn't. I looked around on the ground and elsewhere on the car to see if I could find his carcass, but nothing. He had flown away at some point in the day.

I think I know why I'm so struck by the image of this bee. When I'm not feeling well, either physically or emotionally, I have a hard time holding on to any type of commitment. I just let go of things. But something in this bee caused him to hunker down and just hang on in the face of adversity. I probably need to learn some of that. Don't give up. Hang in there. Enjoy the ride. And when I'm ready, then I can spread my gravity-defying wings and fly....

Clarice